


libation

by whalersandsailors



Category: The Terror (TV 2018), The Terror - Dan Simmons
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Character Study, Gen, Heavy Angst, M/M, Post-Canon, Sole Survivors, Survivor Guilt, mention of cannibalism (past), this does not end happily or have any happy prospects im sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-19 18:49:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19978807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whalersandsailors/pseuds/whalersandsailors
Summary: One man drinks; the other abstains. Neither sobriety nor drunkenness allows them to forget.





	libation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sol_Invictus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sol_Invictus/gifts).



> Written for the tumblr ask sent by harrybestsir: _Joplittle AU where Jopson dies exactly like in canon but Little survives and he has to live with the fact he has left the man he loves to die alone (he doesn't live with it very long)_.

Whereas Captain Crozier maintains his sobriety once the fragmented pair return to England, the former Lieutenant Little develops the habit. He drinks upon waking, with every meal, and in the hours in between. It is the only way that he can keep his limbs warm and his mind blissfully unaware. (His sister watches with quiet concern, but so long as Edward keeps his habits to his rooms and away from his nephews, she tolerates and worries from afar.)

Liquor and its forgiving sting is the only way Edward can sleep, what few and scattered hours he can find during the night. It is the only way he knows to keep the nightmares at bay, to wash away the memory of raw human flesh from his tongue, to fend off the phantom pain in the foot amputated from gangrene, to silence the groaning of ice and the howling of wind that nags the inner canals of his ear like an insatiable itch.

Edward only looks at himself in the mornings when he shaves, but it is with distant eyes and a dazed hand so that his reflection is like a painting he coolly regards, as though looking for cracks in the varnish and determining the skill of each brushstroke, assessing the composition of a tired sailor and his dull, ocean-deep eyes.

His skin is as a pallid as when he limped off the boat that carried him home. The scars on his cheek mar his face like the blemishes of a youth, but the deep mauve circles are cruelly offset by the haggard lines which Edward developed along his mouth and between his brow. A year shy of his fortieth birthday, Edward knows that he looks a decade older.

For a time, he writes to Crozier, but when Edward is declared physically and mentally unfit to stand alongside his Captain during their court martial, the correspondence slows to a trickle, brief and empty paragraphs to single-lined telegrams to nothing, and nothing, and more nothing. Truth be told, the two men have nothing in common save their shared years of suffering, and following the deaths of their comrades, Edward cannot tolerate the older man’s attention. It would be easier if Crozier resented him, blamed him for leaving him to the mutineers and for abandoning the sick crew.

In place of anger, the Captain’s sympathy and unspoken forgiveness drives itself into Edward’s head like a rusted nail, and he hates Crozier for not hating him in turn. Is that not the way of the world, Edward demands of himself, of Crozier, of God; hate begetting hate?

It had always been Edward’s intention to go back for the ill, to orchestrate a heroic rescue for their Captain. Instead, it was Crozier who found him, half frozen, his face pierced with the chain from his watch, during a mad frenzy that has slipped from Edward’s memory and perished on the shale with whatever shred of humanity was left in him.

They are the only two survivors, and the immensity of that lies on Edward like an unforeseen Atlas shouldering the weight of the world. Early in their return voyage, when Edward was of a more sound mind, he asked Crozier about any other survivors.

He asked about one man in particular, the name choked from his mouth like a poison.

Crozier’s answers were the same, monosyllabic, repeated with a gentleness bordering on cruel: “Gone. All gone.”

Edward remembers crying. Once. Crozier—damn him, _damn him_ —had the decency to turn away as Edward sobbed and sniveled like a boy. It was the last they spoke of the others; their very names tainted ( _Blanky, Jopson, Fitzjames, Goodsir, Franklin, Jopson, Irving, Hodgson, Le Vesconte, Gore, Fairholme_ , _Jopson, Hornby, Collins, MacDonald, Peddie, Bridgens, Jopson)_ as though speaking them would invite misery and invoke a curse.

And so, with silence as his only company and memories so repressed they no longer feel like his, Edward drinks. He sits in his room in darkness, too tired to light a lamp, too unconcerned to call a servant to rouse the fire in its hearth. His chair is by the window, where he sees the stars dotting the indigo sky, the new moon a winking shade above the horizon.

“Edward?”

He starts, his mind buzzing and the edges of his vision blurry. Turning to look over his shoulder, his bed is gone, replaced by a hazy alcove, an officer’s berth, dimly lit by a single candle, where two men are nestled around each other, only their heads and bare shoulders peeking from underneath the woolen covers. Rapt with attention, Edward watches as his twin and the shade of another painfully familiar face play out this troubled tableau.

“Yes?”

“May I ask you something?”

A quiet snort. “You already have.”

A laugh that makes Edward’s heart seize. “I’m serious.”

“As am I.”

“What…will happen when we go home?”

“Home?”

“England.”

“A court martial, to be sure. Fanfare, and the newsmen going wild. Promotions, perhaps. The inevitable soirees and dinners.”

“And you?”

“Home…is wherever I make it. Mostly on ship.”

Quieter. “And us?”

They shift, nose to nose, the one lying underneath cups his lover’s face.

“Thomas?”

“Are we…’mostly on ship’?”

Edward watches as his twin kisses the man for his answer, the crease of his lips carrying the declarations and promises that were too difficult or improper to say aloud. He closes his eyes, and when he opens them a second later, he is alone in his room once more, the stars above his head watching.

He reaches a finger to his lips, trying to remember what it felt like. They are dry and chapped, and he finds himself forgetting. The glass in his hand sloshes as he brings it to his lips, and he drinks.

**Author's Note:**

> [my tumblr](https://whalersandsailors.tumblr.com)


End file.
